


The Little Things

by quenne



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: stargate_las, Gen, routines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quenne/pseuds/quenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura paints her toenails on Thursdays.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Little Things

Laura paints her toenails on Thursdays.

Thursdays are a lie. The planet they're on now has twenty-nine and a half hour days, which is hell on scheduling, but they manage well enough. Still, Thursdays, relatively, are the days she paints her toenails because they're when she has the longest stretch without a mission. Three days if she's lucky, less if someone else's luck runs out. No matter what she does to keep her tootsies protected in her boots, the polish comes away chipped and scuffed if she's been off-world. It's not like she wears sandals to the mess, but she likes the pretty things once in a while.

~~~

Chuck makes his own coffee in his quarters. He cold brews it, keeps it in his fridge and drinks a cup a day, no more. The Daedalus runs are regular enough, and since Major Lorne's team scored a ZPM (much to McKay's annoyance), they don't have problems with running out of supplies ( _or oversight_ , he thinks wearily), but he's gotten into the habit and can't seem to shake the vague anxiousness that goes with eating or drinking too much Earth food. It's not the uncomfortable feeling of a too-full belly (which he gets pretty easily with mashed taro roots and ristha steak and narulian-berry pie), but of not knowing where the next batch will come from, even when he knows he's got half a dozen bags of beans stashed in his quarters. You never know when there's going to be an emergency and McKay needs to stay awake for sixty hours straight and they all donate their coffee to the cause (because he's at least remotely tolerable when he's caffeinated) or he has to barter for chocolate to bribe Amelia to take a shift or he needs to trade it for a movie he hasn't seen fifty times. These things happen, in Pegasus, and he's gone without often enough to know the uncertainty that lives in his gut.

~~~

Miko talks to her plants. She's not sure it does any good, but it makes her feel better, anyway, and not so lonely in her quarters at night. Sometimes she tells them stories of when she was little, of going out with her father on the water. Sometimes she sings them songs, the ones she'd be embarrassed to enjoy in front of her friends back home. Sometimes she just tells them how her day went. She wants to believe that living in another galaxy and doing good work is enough, that she doesn't miss the warm weight of a cat on her feet or the way her brother held her hand while they watched scary movies. She confides in her plants, petting and pruning their leaves, and thinks about home.

~~~

Atlantis runs subroutines constantly, a hum of steady information under the spikes of the Earth people's power surges and drains. Atlantis observes them, listening carefully and recording the data dutifully in the history log. Date 13057.14.97.0103, a collection of small things, paint and coffee and homesickness.


End file.
